AAT In Decline? Who develops AAT features?

Deleted Account

Looks like they figured vars out perficktley. 

Dave Crossland

So there really were no other gvar fonts than those Apple published?

Adam Twardoch

It seems that apps which use the old ATSUI text framework have access to the sliders but apps that use the new CoreText framework don’t. I believe the GX variation support has not been "carried over" to CoreText at all, or, at the very least, it’s not been exposed in the API and/or GUI. 

attar

BUT fontTools has a pull request to support it… what else do we type designers need.

Btw Adam, have you got FontForge functionality to work?

Dave Crossland

Is AAT on the way out?

It seems that apps which use the old ATSUI text framework have access to the sliders but apps that use the new CoreText framework don’t

So, my original question seems to be answered: AAT is indeed fading away on Apple platforms.

what else do we type designers need

Well, https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/pull/258 is necessary but not sufficient for us; it is only for supporting reading and writing the data in the table into/out of <glyphVariations> tags, but that doesn't help type designers make new gvar fonts. 

For that we'll need tool(s) that make both the design and production of gvar fonts possible.

On the design side, http://metapolator.com is precisely positioned for just this

For production, any or all of FontForge, FDK and fontTools could be extended to take a few interpolation UFO masters and compiling them into a single gvar'd sfnt file

And we'll also need support in platforms; fortunately freetype support is shipping the raw rendering functionality - http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.fonts.freetype.devel/9785 - so then the question for is how to specify the gvar properties/values in CSS.

Metapolator's https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator/wiki/cascading-properties-sheets is inherently self extensible, so it can accommodate gvar immediately. 

Grzegorz Rolek

If font variations weren’t carried over to Core Text, the various Skia weights wouldn’t show up in Cocoa font menus or otherwise render. In fact, Core Text does have a set of API’s for creating arbitrary, continuous font instances from the axes as queried from the font, and the support dates back to day one. It’s only the sliders that were abandoned for some reason, and it’s more of an issue of the Cocoa text system, or Fonts and Typography UI specifically, as Core Text does not concern itself with anything UI.

I assume people at Apple either decided that the apps requiring an arbitrary control over the axes will have to figure out an appropriate GUI on their own, be it sliders or some original idea for that matter, or they simply had to scrap this part of the text system along with few other “non-essential” features of ATSUI, at least until the new system, from Core Text up to Cocoa, first gets the basics right. If I recall correctly, one of the features that were gone with the transition but have been resurrected later on was the support for optical glyph bounds and hanging punctuation within Core Text.

Dave Crossland

Grzegorz, that's fantastic to know! Thanks!

Grzegorz Rolek

In a more recent news, watching the WWDC session on the San Francisco fonts that makes the rounds today, it looks like the font-defined tracking is another feature of AAT that, while buried with ATSUI, is being brought back to life in Core Text.

Deleted Account

That is all well done and good for users, no? Apple OS is now the most complete type environment for developers n users, isnt it?

Dave Crossland

DB, yes it seems so - but what about type designers? What tools are there for making AAT fonts?

Deleted Account

If "AAT is indeed fading away...", then what difference are tools.

Dave Crossland

Grzegorz appears to have discredited my earlier statement

Dave Crossland

Grzegorz appears to have discredited my earlier statement

Deleted Account

Well let's make sure to give discredit for discredit is due, and that hardly seems like a difficult task to deflect from your glowing countenance, Dave. Those who feel obligated by the approach of the press, to haranguatang on about SF's style, who designed it, some inherant evil of light faces, or some viagratic WTF, should now turn and face the real challenge of user needs. What is important with the Apple OS enhancements, besides, finally, giving the FB a worthy competitor in responsive type design quality, even though they only have one font family, and it doesn't do descenders:), is that Those who have kept Progress so fucking slow for all of us by hogging the road ahead, can now pound sand. They know who they are. Their font libraries will not likely be upgraded, and their browsers, having now fallen behind a faster moving OS, are headed for type pitui. So now, it's only a matter of time before type can get back to its real job, serving users, and not technology or shareholders. What's Next is to reduce the size of these font families and simplify the UI to such families down to a minimum amount of hassle without qualitative sacrifice, which may not seem like it, but are fortunately just one thing.

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

Every Sunday at our local church here in the south of the Netherlands, a guy from the Font Baptists movement speaks in tongues. In general his audience doesn’t have a clue what exactly his message is, but somehow we get the feeling that this is a positive one, and hence it fills our hearts with hope and joy.

Deleted Account

Geeeeeze, I completely forgot about Frank ala Mode. So:
type + lots of work = typography, or 
same type + intelligence - work = typography.